The present invention relates generally to improvements in the creation and utilization of various methods of determining pricing and reward incentives within a retail transaction. In particular, the invention relates to advantageous methods and apparatus for calculating the price to be paid, or the amount of a reward to be given, for a given quantity of an item or grouping of items purchased. The present invention allows flexibility in changing the pricing, rewards, incentives and the like without the need to re-program application program code when those changes are made.
Retailers have traditionally used a variety of pricing methodologies to incent customers to shop in their stores and to purchase more of a given product during a shopping trip. Among the earliest pricing incentives were those that were used to offer a percentage discount, a fixed amount discount or a quantity discount, such as three units for one dollar. With the introduction of programmable Point-of-Sale (POS) equipment, retailers developed many variations on these simple incentive pricing methods. Modern POS application programs typically use a Price Look-Up (PLU) file to contain the necessary pricing, product identification, product grouping and bar code information for all items carried in the retail establishment.
As retailers have demanded greater pricing flexibility options from their POS suppliers, the suppliers have generally responded by adding additional program fields to the record format structure used in the PLU file. In order to implement different pricing methods, the POS application programs then need to be modified to interpret the additional PLU record fields to achieve the desired incentive pricing result. One major problem faced by the POS suppliers is that they can never anticipate all of the possible pricing and reward combination features that their end-user customers will demand. This has resulted in a continuous cycle where the POS suppliers have added features to their application programs in response to demands from their customers. One outcome from this cycle is that the POS suppliers have modified their PLU file formats by adding additional fields and increasing the length of those fields to anticipate the demands of their customers.
In recent years, there has been a trend in the retail industry where the retailers have sought open systems from their POS suppliers. The earliest POS systems were comprised of hardware and software that were proprietary to a given manufacturer, requiring the retailer to purchase all of their POS system components from the same supplier. While this proprietary approach helped to ensure that all the components of a given system worked together properly, it also tended to force a given retailer to stay locked into one POS supplier""s equipment for a long time. By contrast, an open system is one in which the hardware and software interfaces are designed around common standards that are widely known and accepted. Although it is now possible to purchase the hardware, operating system software and application program software components separately, there are still few accepted standards in the industry for file structures and interfaces. This is true for the file structure of PLU files. The result is that retailers are still faced with the expensive problem of modifying their POS application programs and PLU file structures whenever they choose to implement different pricing or reward incentive methods. This problem is further compounded by the difficulties of having to make frequent programming changes to older POS application programs that were written in computer languages such as ASSEMBLER, BASIC and other legacy languages. Retailers are having an increasingly difficult time finding skilled programmers that are fluent in these languages. As POS suppliers have moved to more open technologies for new POS solutions, many retailers are now forced to bear the expense of maintaining or modifying these older POS application programs and the associated PLU record file structure in order to implement new pricing methods and reward incentive plans such as frequent shopper programs. These frequent shopper programs typically consist of rewarding frequent shoppers with various benefits. Such benefits include discounts for selected merchandise given at the time of purchase, notification of future promotions, as well as point accumulation rewards for repeat customer purchases over time.
The present invention recognizes that there exists a need in a variety of contexts for a method of changing pricing and reward values more readily within a POS system. Such a method should advantageously allow the pricing or reward incentive value and structure to be changed without requiring modifications to the PLU file structure and the POS application program each time such changes are desired. Such modifications may include changing the number of fields and the field lengths contained within the PLU file, as well as changes to the POS application program that might also be required to interpret the changes to the PLU file structure.
To this end, among its other aspects, the present invention provides a universal method and apparatus for changing pricing and reward values within a retail transaction. One aspect of the present invention includes a method for setting the price or reward value for one item, or a grouping of items, based upon the quantity of that item, or grouping, purchased. The methods and apparatus described also allow for setting a price or reward value for multiple purchases of an item, or grouping of items, by a given customer over a period of time. The methods and apparatus described also provide the capability to repeat a sequence of different prices and reward levels based upon cumulative purchases. As described in greater detail below, the present invention may be much more readily implemented than existing methods, while providing more flexibility to make price and reward value changes than existing methods.